Global 9 Oct 2013

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MEPs Antonyia Parvanova and Rebecca Taylor invite you to participate in a roundtable discussion entitled “eHealth: towards improving patient safety, increasing clinical accountability and addressing information governance”, co-organised by ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) and Hanover. The aim of the event is to influence and feed into the eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 debate and underline the importance of sharing of good eHealth practice in Europe.

The way healthcare is delivered is changing. There is a growing demand to ensure greater access to healthcare services with scarce resources, whilst ensuring the quality of services and patient safety.

New technologies can support healthcare systems face these new challenges. The European Commission’s eHealth Action Plan, presented in 2012, highlighted the barriers to greater use of digital solutions in healthcare. The green paper on Mobile Health (mHealth) will complement the Action Plan and will focus on the quality and security of exchanged patient data. Other regulatory initiatives, including the currently discussed Regulation on Medical devices and Regulation on In-Vitro diagnostics medical devices, try to improve patient safety.

However, the adoption of eHealth solutions will not simply happen by putting in place the right legal framework and technological safeguards. Despite three decades of eHealth investment by European Member States, a certain level of scepticism about the value of eHealth still persists. It is crucial to support the dissemination of evidence of good eHealth in order to allow the EU as a whole to reap the benefits that eHealth can provide.

The debate will start with a new eHealth and patient safety study completed by ACCA at Leicester University Hospital in the UK. It explores the impact of adopting a mobile and fully interoperable patient hand-over system. The report clearly demonstrates that the proposed multi-faceted solution not only increased patient safety, but also won the confidence of the doctors and nurses using it and promises to generate a good return on investment for the hospital.